7.26.2006

Just cause you can..doesn't mean it's a good idea *

Fear not, once you are a published writer you will STILL be able to obsess about lots of interesting things. Not just how well your book is doing (Amazon Refresh! Amazon Refresh!) but now how well you are doing compared to the gopher in the next cubicle over whose uncle is the nephew of Judith Regan's love slave so got a six gazillion dollar advance for his book of poems "Love Among the Ruins". Now, thanks to this guy, you can do that. Quickly! Easily! I mean, why spend time memorizing poems when you can exercise your paranoia algorhythmically!

thanks to Towse for the link and the reminder to read The Nudist on the Night Shift

Um, how is this different from BookScan? Except for the fact that it's less useful, since BookScan has stats from everywhere and this seems to only have Amazon stats, which don't actually matter that much in the grand scheme of things?

Oy. My husband discovered this about a month after my book was released, and he's totally obsessed by it. (He's a numbers-crunching marketing type guy in his day job.) I think he has it as his screensaver, even.

Me, though - I just don't want to know. What's the point? It's not like I can do a dang thing about how my Amazon number is in relation to Jennifer Weiner's. And nobody still can decipher what that number means in the grand scheme of things, anyway. However, I guess I do understand the attraction of this because there's simply no other way to measure how your sales are doing unless you subscribe to BookScan, which most mortals can't. And we're so starved for information, and we're not going to get it that easily from our publishers, that's for sure.

Even though the numbers are meaningless, I know lots of writers who actually do go to Amazon many times a day to see their ranking. Maybe the idea that someone bought a book that day and sent their rating soaring is enough to make them feel good.

If you're interested in about 5% or less of book sales, then by all means, sign up, waste your time. That's all that Amazon reflects. And the new rumor now is that those numbers on Amazon also include used sales. Who knows. Who cares? New writers, usually. It's fun, addictive, frustrating, exciting to see your number jump when something happens. A spot on TV, an article. And then you're ready to crash with the numbers when they fall as quickly as the next day. Treat the Amazon numbers like your bathroom scale. It's not good to get on it everyday. Not even every month.

I can't see any real use for it. Amazon rankings, as has been discussed here and elsewhere, are not synonymous with actual sales figures. Comparing the relationships of various Amazon rankings is useless.

We'd have something useful if Nielsen would provide an inexpensive subcription to Bookscan for writers.